In your message of 15 February 2000 you write:
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 08:37:53AM -0700, Thomas Roell wrote:
>
> > those HW related things, there really should be a way for an
> > application to figure out, what core-API functions and what extensions
> > are done in SW only, vs. which ones can use HW support. Maybe that is
>
> This has been discussed ad nauseum, and there is no acceptable way to
> implement such things. What defines "hardware accelerated"? OpenGL is
> designed the way it is for a reason.
>
> You should see the spaghetti Direct3D code I sometimes get with all
> these D3D cap bits and conditional statements based on
> chipsets... aigh, what a mess.
That is true. The problem that I was referring to is more
subtile. Take ARB_multitexture for example. I can expose this
extension always (whether there is more than one texture unit in HW or
not). Half of the applications see the extension and think they always
have 2 texture units. Hmmm ... broken application, ok. Now there are
some apps which really want to use 2 texture units, and don't really
care whether it's done in SW or not. If I now expose multi-texture
with 2 texture units, while the HW supports only 1 in HW, then games,
which are performance sensitive there will be unusable.
It would just be very nice to have some kind of hinting-scheme.
- Thomas
--
Thomas Roell /\ An imperfect plan executed violently
Xi Graphics / \/\ _ is far superior to a perfect plan.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / / \ \
/ Oelch! \ \ George Patton
